Beast Download (1984 Puzzle Game)

The hows and whys are apparently unimportant. What matters is this: you, represented by a double-pointing pair of ASCII glyphs, are trapped in a devious labyrinth. Your goal, however, is not to escape, but rather to survive: in the maze with you are a number of Beasts, looking like slim sinister Hs. If they find you, they will eat away one of your lives.

Your weapons? None. However, nearly all of the walls in this maze can be pushed, like Sokoban crates... only indefinitely stackable. If you are able to line up wall segments and wait until a Beast enters into a gap between them, you should be able to close the gap on top of him, pushing the walls shut and making Beastly pulp. Maneuvre carefully, though, for once the wall segments are backed against the outside walls, you can only pull them back into "live", useful territory on certain levels. Also, you may hit a snag against solid-coloured immobile walls, preventing your stack from mashing the intended Beast. (Further complicating things, these immobile, "static" walls become deadly to the touch on later levels!)

On harder levels, you get to meet the whole Beast family, Super-Beasts, eggs and the Hatched Beasts that emerge from them. Meaner and tougher, they possess enhanced abilities, such as only being crushable against immobile walls or being able to turn the tables and push walls back at you (how quickly the crusher is become the crushee!)

Ahh, well this is a long time ago... I was five. I remember I'd never seen a PC before and I went to the attic. My mother was sitting behind a TV and controlling a small blue thing with which she crashed the little "H" creatures using green bricks. You can imagine I thought "WHAT THE @#&$???", but yeah, I was five, so I didn't think like that back then ;)

That was my very first experience with computers. She showed me how to play this game and so I did and I couldn't stop. Since then I was a PC addictive...

Well, as I said, the idea is really simple, you control a little blue "thing" and you crush small "H" creatures by using bricks. For the very first game you play, this game is awesome. For me, it's an experience I will never forget. For others, it won't be a real great game. The graphics aren't really special. When playing this game, you should really slow down your PC, cuz it will be unplayable on a pentium 75+!

For people who like these kind of games, try the game Caves, that looks like it, but has more variation, better graphics and the game is more fun to play!

How to run this game on modern Windows PC?

People who downloaded Beast have also downloaded:
Banatron, Tau Ceti